Read City Center, The for Free Online Page A

instruction.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Very.”
    “Ava, this doesn’t sound good.”
    “You have to trust me. Please get me the software.”
    “Fine. I’ll help, but you better fill me in later. Check your inbox in a bit.”
    Ava took a shower while she waited for the software to download. The purification water massaged her body. She thought about her encounter with Joseph. The few minutes they had together weren’t enough to make a sound assessment, but she knew there was something more to him than what the reports said. She had always suspected something was off with the information the Planners inundated them with. Her instincts told her something was off and she had learned to pay attention to the way her body reacted to things, rather than her mind. Delilah was taking longer than usual and Ava’s nervous stomach tightened up. She wanted to read the book and get to the bottom of whatever it was. Maybe there was something in there that could save Joseph from termination? Or maybe it was just a fact-finding mission. She checked the time, wishing Delilah would hurry up. The dark-market might have slowed down because of the crisis.
    Ava’s tablet dinged, letting her know she had a message. She wirelessly downloaded the reading instruction software onto her internal microchip and sat in the lounger with the book. She didn’t want to rush through the pages. They could hold valuable information that could change everything. She wanted to savor every single written word, so she waited for her heartbeat to slow down before she opened to the first page.
     
     
     
    This Journal Belongs to L illian Strader
     
    The year the Planners set the New Agenda into motion was the worst year of my life. Worse than when my best friend moved away to San Francisco. Worse than when I fell off the jungle gym and broke both of my arms in fifth grade. And worse than getting stood up for the 9th grade homecoming dance by that jerk Brian. They advertised it as “The Repatterning” to give it a positive spin, but like all advertisers, they lied to us.
    That was the year Mom and Dad lost their jobs, my brother was drafted into the army, and my Dad and little sister contracted a deadly virus. California suffered record-breaking unemployment rates. The entertainment industry went bankrupt. The moneymakers disappeared to their homes outside of Los Angeles. In a matter of months, the rates went from single digits to an astronomical high of 83%. Big banks took over smaller banks, and then they took over the last remaining corporations, then homes. The stock market dropped lower than the historical crash of 1929, and then the market just disappeared, obliterating commerce altogether. Businesses became obsolete. Products and services all of us had been using for decades vanished into a vortex of nothingness. Only a handful of establishments survived the catastrophic economic collapse: big banking, pharmaceutical cartels and the Planners—a new division of high-level government officials who were supposed to rebuild the country, but who annihilated every last decent fiber.
    The one remaining network aired 24-hour news reports. My brother said they were feeding us lies. We weren’t clear on the accuracy of the reports, but Mom said we could decipher the real news by reading in between the lines. The channel reported an onslaught of gun-related murders and massive shootings in public forums. The Planners forced people to hand in their guns. Anyone who refused got killed. I stopped watching the news. It was too depressing.
    Before my brother shipped off to train for the Final War, never to be seen again, he told us the economic disaster was strategically engineered. He warned us more would come.
    “The decline of civilization starts with vaporizing the economy. Then we have a civil war, then a global war so behemoth it’ll take us back to ground zero,” he said.
    He went on and on about the elite class. “Their main objective is to